Historian and BBC presenter Bamber Gascoigne illuminates the progress of Christianity by presenting it as a saga of politics, intolerance, and greed standing side by side with genuine spiritual experiences. Published in the United States as Christianity: A History, the book sets the faith in context with other world religions and introduces a varied cast of characters like St. Simeon, who spent 20 years atop a 50-foot column; Pope Paul IV, who put fig leaves on the Vatican's collection of antique sculptures and employed a painter to enrobe some of the naked figures in Michelangelo's Last Judgement; and the Renaissance popes who manipulated the Church to benefit their illegitimate children.